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Lara Logan


Lara Logan is in the news again. 

In the early years of this millennium, LL seemed to be on a path to a great career as a television journalist. She was with CBS, for gawd's sake. Its news division has given the world Murrow and Cronkite. It is presumably where a young woman or man with ambitions in that line wants to be.

In 2011, as the Mubarak government collapsed in Egypt, as crowds filled up the streets of Cairo, CBS sent Logan and a camera crew to cover this huge story for them.   

This is where our story turns ugly.  Soon after Mubarak's resignation, Logan was raped by a rowdy celebratory crowd that may have included up to 300 men. She was rescued by soldiers and flown home where she was hospitalized for four days. 

On a message board to which I was contributing with some regularity at the time, I remember one commenter saying that he disagreed with news coverage of the attack. He thought the mainstream media ought to shut up about Logan. said he thought it was a tradition that reporters aren't the subject of stories, that the tradition was here being violated without good cause, and so forth. 

I got into some back-and-forth with him about this, in which I explained that although it would be considered inappropriate for Logan herself to do a stand-up piece on CBS News about the attack on her (and in fact that Dan Rather had said nothing on air about the notorious and much less serious what-s-the-frequency attack on him in 1986) there is no "tradition" that "the press" as a whole should ignore violence against reporters, sexual or otherwise. REM would not have titled that song after an incident that had remained uncovered and obscure. 

Anyway: after her assault. Logan's career really went off the rails. She was fired from CBS in 2013 after a report of hers (on an obscure platform known as 60 Minutes) with regard to the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, turned out to be riddled with errors. She admitted the errors, and blamed them on the manager of the local guard force, Dylan Davies, who she alleged fed her the falsehoods. That of course was a poor excuse. Did she think the subject matter somehow deserved a story based on one unconfirmed source?   

Logan has been more outspokenly rightward ever since, and in her latest iteration she has gotten fired from NewsMax for going too far. NewsMax. The network run by people who had all been fired from Fox News for going too far. 

I won't get into the particulars of the latest Logan story. I'll just say: I hope she gets some good professional help. I suspect she is still processing the 2011 trauma. But that is my personal uninformed guess. I am much more certain that she could use some time away from the public eye.  


   


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  1. Paul D. Van PeltOctober 26, 2022 at 10:05 AM

    I agree. Media work has risks that most of us don't think of---a decidedly dark side.

    ReplyDelete

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